The Real Black Limo

“Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be fish.”—Ovid

The Black Limo Fantasy actually came true for me once. A friend of my sister’s worked for a market research company, and was looking for women to test Dove soap. My sister, Jane, called me one afternoon to invite me down to their office for an interview, so, on a lark, I went. A friendly woman interviewed us, one by one, on videotape.

A week later, I got a call from the marketing company telling me that they had selected a group of women to do a seven-day trial use of the soap and inviting me to participate. I had them send me the sample bar of soap. You know what? I really liked it! “It’s one-quarter cleansing cream” and it made my skin feel really soft. So it was easy for me to praise the soap when I went back in for my follow-up interview.

I knew that the makers of Dove used “real people” as opposed to professional actors in their commercials. I wondered if this was an audition in disguise? When I got there, I could tell that it was: I saw several people behind a camera in a small room, and others in another room with see-through glass walls. The lighting was professional and there was an excitement and energy in the room. I said every good thing I could think of to say about the soap and they all smiled and beamed at me. Ten years after giving up my acting career I was actually about to get a national commercial. Of all the fleet of ships I had launched during my acting days, most of which had sunk or sailed into someone else’s harbor, this one staunch, lone survivor was about to sail home.

They hired me! They called and asked me if I’d like to go to New York to film a television commercial and I said, “You betcha!” They flew me to New York, put me up at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, and gave me a check for $1,000 for expenses while I was there. I was getting paid standard Screen Actors Guild rates (there was a moment’s hesitation when they discovered I already belonged to SAG—maybe I wasn’t a real person after all—but since I hadn’t done anything in so long, they said it was okay). Over the next two years, I made about $15,000. Residuals are glorious: You work a couple of days and get paid for it over and over and over. Checks just keep showing up in your mailbox—truly “Magic Money.”

But for me, the best part was waiting for me at New York’s JFK airport: The “Real Black Limo” had arrived to whisk me away.

Good energy is never completely lost. Whenever you reach out to accomplish something, that positive energy will manifest somewhere, sometime, in unexpected ways. You still have some hardy little ships clinging to the waves out there. Check the horizon.

One year, Paul McCartney finally got a record deal with Decca for his ballet composition “Ocean’s Kingdom” which had its world premieres at the New York City Ballet. This deal was struck nearly 50 years after they famously rejected the Beatles for their record label in what has been called one of the music industry’s biggest blunders.

Decca famously snubbed the Fab Four early in 1962, reportedly saying at the time that “guitar groups are on the way out” and “the Beatles have no future in show business.” So EMI signed them and the rest was history.

Don’t you love it?

I have a book called “Rotten Reviews and Rejections” which is a compendium of rejection notices for books that later became famous and revered. It really helped me when I was trying to get a publisher for “The Wealthy Spirit” and getting a lot of rejections, largely because it was felt that a page-a-day book about money wouldn’t work. It hadn’t been done before. It’s funny now, because the thing most readers like about the book is that it’s a daily positive message about money that keeps them on track on a daily basis.

So thanks again, Sourcebooks, for being my publisher and help spread “The Wealthy Spirit”, “Zero to Zillionaire, and “From Worry to Wealthy” words all over the world!

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